1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to contact center monitoring, and more particularly to generating skill information of an agent.
2. Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service inbound and outbound contacts from customers. A typical contact center routes incoming requests/contacts to one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming requests/contacts. Contact centers distribute contacts, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria.
Normally in present-day operations, when an Automatic Call Distributor system's controller detects an agent has become available to handle a contact, the controller identifies all predefined contact-handling queues for the agent (usually in some order of priority) and delivers to the agent the highest-priority, oldest contact that matches the agent's highest-priority queue. This delivery may be based on one or more of the contact center's objectives.
Usually, the primary objective of contact center management is to maximize contact center's performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency. Contact center efficiency is generally measured in two ways.
Service level is one measurement of a contact center's efficiency. Service level is typically determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted within the specified period by the number accepted plus the number that were not accepted, but completed in some other way (e.g., abandoned, given busy, cancelled, flowed out). Of course, service level definitions may vary from one enterprise to another.
Match rate is another indicator used in measuring contact center efficiency. Match rate is usually determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted by a primary skill level agent within a period of time by the number of contacts accepted by any agent for a queue over the same period.
An agent with a primary skill level is one that typically can handle contacts of a certain nature most effectively and/or efficiently. There are other contact center agents that may not be as proficient as the primary skill level agent, and those agents are identified either as secondary skill level agents or backup skill level agents. As can be appreciated, contacts received by a primary skill level agent are typically handled more quickly and accurately or effectively (e.g., higher revenue attained) than a contact received by a secondary or even backup skill level agent. Therefore, it is an objective of most contact centers to optimize match rate along with service level.
Thus, within a contact center, to improve the overall efficiency and profitability, it is in the best interest that a primary skill level agent accepts each and every contact. It is a supervisor's role to identify these skills and subsequently assign agents to contact, where the agents will be considered primary skill level agent.
Conventional solutions for identifying primary skill agent require substantial manual input from each supervisor for his team. However, a typically contact center has thousands of agents, each with multiple skills that might add to the efficient and efficacy of the contact center. Moreover, over a period of time, agents may develop other skills and become primary skill level agent, at those skills, as well.
Thus, there is need for an automated system and method for generating skill information of agents in a contact center.